What is IPv6? It’s the latest version of the internet protocol which dictates the allocation of physical online addresses. What is IPv6 day then? On the 8th of June all participants in IPv6 day will be making some of their online services available to the world wide web via IPv6 addressing for testing purposes. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is just a trial and any sites made available via IPv6 on that day will be running in parallel with IPv4. In particular we’re planning to make our website available via a v6 address. Testing has already been underway for a while now and sections of our internal LAN here at Plusnet are already IPv6 compliant and are working without any issues. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the industry has recognised a test platform for IPv6 since as early as 1996 as part of a project called 6Bone. From the point of view of an individual being connected to the web rather than the availability of content I will personally be involved in trialling an IPv6 address on the day and I’ll be posting a follow up of how things went. Why is this happening? As IP addresses are numeric, the format of IPv4 means that the number of addresses is finite and will one day reach depletion. Whilst this is a very real risk, precautions are being taken on a number of levels to make sure that contingencies are in place should this become a reality. However we would like to assure you that this is very unlikely. IPv6 means that a new format is used which facilitates greater address availability, this means that more long term development of online services is now a lot more feasible for companies like ourselves. Brian Carpenter From IBM has made the following comments about IPV6 day: “It's very encouraging to see IPv6 moving forward both technically and commercially, with its address assignments now routinely managed by the same registries that look after the rapidly diminishing IPv4 address pool. I look forward to the day the Internet reaches ten billion active nodes with public addresses, which will only be possible with IPv6.” Bob Fink of the IPv6 project has also commented on how these events shape the future of the internet: “After more than ten years of planning, development and experience with IPv6, with efforts from all around the world, it is gratifying for me to see the 6Bone phase-out on the 6th of June 2006, having served it's purpose to stimulate IPv6 deployment and experience, leaving IPv6 a healthy ongoing component of the future of the Internet!” How is Plusnet preparing for this? Parts of our internal network have already been IP v6 enabled for some time now and so far no issues have been encountered. We do fully realise that more extensive testing will need to be done from a customer’s point of view. So with that in mind we do need some trialists. You can join in an IP v6 day related discussion on our community forum at http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,89019.0.html Thanks for reading. Adam *We now have our full compliment of trialists. Thank you to all that have shown an interest.*
IPv6 Day